Thanks for sending this along, Jon. I really find this topic fascinating and important.
It's easy to hide behind out mission and think these ethics don't apply to us but you're certainly correct: some people could likely be classified as addicted to editing Wikipedia. Is this good for them? What do we owe them in terms of wellness? How can helping our users live a balanced (yet engaged!) life with Wikimedia, and how might it actually improve the encyclopedia.
(Small aside: There are some other categories of websites/apps that manage to do this responsibly, even though their business objectives are to make a profit. I'm always impressed with how most dating apps manage to do this (their service is designed to get people off their service.) Health apps could also be another place to explore ethical engagement tactics. And my personal favorite is Nintendo — it flat-out interrupts some games to tell the player to go outside and get some air. 😆)
Jon — do you propose we try to get them on the horn to hear about their work?
This is an interesting development related to a
piece shared by Josh almost a year ago about Google's former "design ethicist", Tristan Harris. Tristan has been waging a war against engineering products that vie for user attention at the expense of their users' wellbeing. He raises interesting questions about addiction and the morals of trying to increase time spent (even on a project like Wikipedia).
Now it
seems to be getting traction. They have raised tens of millions of $s for PSAs about tech addiction and are developing guidelines for engineers and designers. I'm curious to see them when they're done.